1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a memory arrangement for data storage and retrieval, that permits words (n bits of information) to be accessed (stored or retrieved) in a variety of different modes.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventiotally, data is stored in digital integrated circuits as contiguous words, each word having a single unique address. In certain applications it is required to access data from common bit locations of different, but regularly spaced words (e.g. the 5th bit of every 16th word). Normally this would be achieved by a masking operation carried out by a processor connected to the memory, but this is highly inefficient in terms of data retrieval, since it requires `n` memory accesses to read (or write) n bits of data, together with the necessary address generation and masking operations to be carried out by the attached processor.